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William James writes about the effect of intoxication with ether or nitrous oxide:
He also records some attempts he made to record the insight in writing before passing out:
and again:
Moving to the other side of the world, Dostoyevsky had this to say to one of his friends about the seconds leading up to a grand mal epileptic seizure:
And Dostoyevsky gives this description in The Idiot:
What seems to be going on here is that memories are stored in associative patterns among the clusters of neurons, and its possible to move from one to another through associative links, rather like the chains of associations Jung elicited from his patients rather more forcefully than Freud did. The pattern is one that ordinarily leads to meaning (a memory, or a new conclusion based on comparing new perception to a memory), but in the case of the drug or the seizure what ought to take place does not, and while the illusion of meaning is heightened into a sense of joyous discovery, the actual connections followed are random and meaningless.
As I may have mentioned before here I experience what I've been told are complex partial seizures, perhaps once or twice a month: sometimes singly, sometimes 4 or 5 within the space of 2 days--my spells as Mme. Malkhos calls them. What I experience is just what is described above, with no fainting or anything else unpleasant to follow--the worst one I had I happened to be driving and thought it better to pull off to the side of the road and was nauseated for about a minute but nothing came of it.
With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snowpeak from which sunset glow has just fled, or at a black cinder left by an extinguished brand.
He also records some attempts he made to record the insight in writing before passing out:
Hogamous, higamous
Man is polygamous
Higamous, hogamous
Woman monogamous.
Man is polygamous
Higamous, hogamous
Woman monogamous.
and again:
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
Moving to the other side of the world, Dostoyevsky had this to say to one of his friends about the seconds leading up to a grand mal epileptic seizure:
Fyodor Mikhailovich often told me that before the onset of an attack there were minutes in which he was in rapture. "For several moments," he said, "I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life - such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps."
And Dostoyevsky gives this description in The Idiot:
He was thinking, incidentally, that there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself (if it occurred in waking hours) when suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments...His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of understanding...but these moments, these glimmerings were still but a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) with which the seizure itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable.
What seems to be going on here is that memories are stored in associative patterns among the clusters of neurons, and its possible to move from one to another through associative links, rather like the chains of associations Jung elicited from his patients rather more forcefully than Freud did. The pattern is one that ordinarily leads to meaning (a memory, or a new conclusion based on comparing new perception to a memory), but in the case of the drug or the seizure what ought to take place does not, and while the illusion of meaning is heightened into a sense of joyous discovery, the actual connections followed are random and meaningless.
As I may have mentioned before here I experience what I've been told are complex partial seizures, perhaps once or twice a month: sometimes singly, sometimes 4 or 5 within the space of 2 days--my spells as Mme. Malkhos calls them. What I experience is just what is described above, with no fainting or anything else unpleasant to follow--the worst one I had I happened to be driving and thought it better to pull off to the side of the road and was nauseated for about a minute but nothing came of it.
